IA Creatives: “I Notice People Disappear” by Elizabeth Sobieski

LA Artist Kimberly Brooks in Palm Beach

By Elizabeth Sobieski

The Venice based artist Kimberly Brooks’ one woman show opened at Arthouse 429, West Palm Beach, Florida on February 6 (on view through March 6) and is entitled “I Notice People Disappear”. I have noticed an extraordinary metamorphosis in Brooks’ paintings over the last three or four years, since first admiring her work at LA’s Taylor De Cordoba Gallery. Her older highly figurative works, while masterfully wrought, didn’t possess the intriguing haunted quality, the almost Orientalist mystery of these new paintings. While she references art history and her own personal voyages, both through her complex interior life (Catch Kimberly Brooks’ TedTalk on ‘The Creative Process in 8 Stages’!) and her extensive global travels, especially in South Asia, Brooks’ oil-on-linen paintings are completely fresh, startlingly free. The Banquet displays a uniquely telescoped room, where almost ghostly figures are seated and standing. Pink Salon is a revelation, another interior space, but this one containing a single figure, a woman perched on a grand Regency-type sofa, somehow isolated amidst precious objects. Who are these people? They have no facial features, but their costumes and movements tell us much. The viewer doesn’t see the details, but somehow we know the carpet is the finest Persian and the background painting is a masterpiece. It’s an unusual juxtaposition, but the Blue Drawing Room feels both opulent and spiritual. Smaller works seem to evoke fading portraits made during the time of the British Raj. While we see only fragments, they are fragments of luxury…and somehow fragments of loss, a lost time and people no longer here. People who have disappeared.